Aguardiente blurred the edges of that night, but Néstor’s mind clung to one sharp corner of the memory: that night, Old Juan took a small bag of salt and poured it on the ground in a circle around his mare and the place where he would sleep, his head on his saddle as a pillow.
A ring of salt. Perhaps, drunk though he was, his mind seized this detail because of how it echoed Abuela’s stories of witches and monsters. Perhaps it was simply too strange not to notice.
Camp unfolded before them, a small field of tents and horses. Fires reddened the deepening night. Being back in their glow loosened something in Néstor’s shoulders. As if he had been bracing against something when his back was exposed in the high grasses.
A guttural scream split the peace of camp.
Néstor, Casimiro, and Nena froze like deer. It carried for a long moment, pitching agonizingly sharp. Then snapped off as suddenly as it had begun.
The following silence pressed on his ears with a grim, dark weight.
The scream came from the riverbank.
Beto.
He had to go back. Now. Beto was in danger.
He ushered Nena forward into the camp’s circle of light.
“Stay here. With Casimiro.” His voice was not his own. Nena took a step back, closer to the fire. Her dark eyes were wide with fear. “Please,” he added, panic fraying the syllables.
“A torch!” Casimiro bellowed, and when one was offered to him, he passed it to Néstor. “Be careful.”
Néstor and a handful of other vaqueros turned and plunged back down the path. Metallic clicks rose around him as guns were readied. Sweat beaded at his hairline from the torch’s heat; he felt the light it cast barely break the darkness as they surged forward. They dived around the desiccated carcass.
When they reached the riverbank, Néstor swore he saw a humanlike form bent over a body. Then, as he and the torch grew closer, it was gone—vanished like mist across the slick surface of the river.
The torchlight fell on reddish hair. A pale, stricken face.
“Shit. Shit.” Néstor passed the torch to the vaquero closest to him and ran the last steps between him and Beto, his boots slipping against the pebbles of the riverbank. “Beto.”
The shirt of one arm was torn open; wet, sticky liquid oozed thickly from a wound on his upper arm. It needed to be bound to prevent him from bleeding out. Néstor tore the kerchief from his neck and frantically began to tie it around Beto’s upper arm.
His hands shook violently. He fumbled; the kerchief slipped. Blood stained his fingers as he tried again to staunch the wound.
Beto’s face was frozen in a mask of horror, his eyelids peeled wide. Torchlight reflected red in his pale irises.
His chest did not rise and fall.
Every time Beto fell, he sprang back to his feet. Even the day they met, when Beto was thrown from his horse in the path of a charging bull, he hauled himself upright and gripped his lasso, buckling ankle be damned.
Beto was so still. His eyes were glazed over like the eyes of the bull carcass.
Darkness curled intrusively around the edges of Néstor’s vision. Beto was the rope that tethered him to this world. Beto was his brother in all but name. He was frozen, strung like a slaughtered lamb between one reality and another, where the smell of water was not Río Bravo but the springs at Los Ojuelos, where it was not Beto’s chest that would not rise, no matter how hard he willed it to, but Nena’s.
The other vaqueros exchanged curses over his head. They were speaking; scattered fragments fell on Néstor’s ears, chaining in an order that made no sense.
“Susto,” said a voice. “Poison.”
“Like Ignacio,” said another.
“Se?orita Magdalena.”
“?ndale, let’s carry him.”
An order he could follow. He slipped his arms under Beto’s armpits, one of his hands slipping over blood as it grasped for purchase. Another vaquero took Beto’s legs; a third led the way back to camp with a torch and Beto’s muddied hat in hand.
Néstor’s vision swam. Torchlight danced off the grasses ahead of him. Darkness curled into humanlike shapes in the back corners of his vision, nearly out of sight. Curling, humped backs; long, thin arms ending in claws like machetes. Beto smelled of the sweat of fear, metallic and acrid as gunpowder. He smelled of blood. Beto’s head lolled against Néstor’s shoulder; his crown cracked squarely against Néstor’s jaw.
Néstor’s teeth slammed together at the impact. “Hijo de—”
“Just a bit farther, compadre,” one of the vaqueros called to him.
His back ached. His thighs burned from the effort of carrying Beto forward.
But this time, he was not alone. Other men cursed alongside him. Other men who did not say Beto was dead, nor seemed as panicked as he was.
They made the final turn through the high grasses. The low red glow of camp unfolded before them like a ribbon.
“?Curandera!” the vaquero with the torch cried. “Quickly!”
A few more steps. Néstor’s chest heaved with the effort as they brought Beto to the edge of the fire and lay him on the ground.
Néstor caught Beto’s head and lay it down as gently as he could.
A female voice was barking orders. Shadows moved around him.
Beto’s eyes would not stop staring overhead. Glassy, unblinking, so wide that their strange, pale irises were ringed with bloodshot white.
Nena knelt at Beto’s side. She set two stones on the ground next to her with a harsh clatter; dried and fresh herbs emerged from a cloth bag. Lavender. Rosemary.
Abuela smells. A curandera’s smells.
“I said, either get out of the way or help,” Nena snapped. When he stared dumbly back, she made an annoyed sound and thrust the stones at him. Next came a fistful of herbs that he could not tell apart. “Grind these.”
He obeyed. It forced him to tear his eyes away from Beto’s blank stare. The aromas that rose from the crushed herbs eased the nausea that crept up the back of his throat at the sight of Nena untying his haphazard kerchief tourniquet, her fingers taking on the wet, red sheen of blood. A knife glinted as she cut away Beto’s sleeve and lay his arm away from his side, exposing the wound on the inside of his arm.
The wound was round and puckered; it looked as if a beast had sunk its jaws into the pale flesh of Beto’s inner arm.
Nena took a small pail of water and rinsed the wound. Néstor averted his gaze, focusing on his task.
“Now hand them back,” Nena barked at Néstor, then took the crushed herbs. She added water to them and mixed it into a poultice, then scooped the mixture out with her fingertips.
She smeared it directly on Beto’s wound, ensuring the entire area was covered. Her brows creased with concentration as she worked, bent over Beto’s body. Then she rocked back on her heels and reached to the side for something.
“What is his full name?” she asked.
“What?”
“Beto’s full name,” Nena repeated. In one hand she held a bundle of dried rosemary. “I need it.”
“Albert Fitz,” Néstor said. “But he hates it. He uses his mother’s name.”
“Which is?” Nena prompted, impatience sharpening her tone.
“Cepeda.”
With light hands, she ran the rosemary over his body, from forehead to chest, then over his limbs. Her movements mirrored Abuela’s, smooth and confident.
“Regresa, Albert Cepeda,” she murmured as she worked. “Regresa. Beto Cepeda, regresa.”
Perhaps Néstor was imagining it. Perhaps Nena’s repeated regresa lulled him into a trance, like a lullaby, like a spell, softening the edges of his reality, but as she spoke, he felt as if the air around them grew clearer. Gentler.
Beto’s eyes fluttered shut.
13
NENA
BETO INHALED DEEPLY through his nose. His chest rose, then fell. Twice. A third time. A rhythm.
His eyes did not open.
Why wouldn’t he wake? Surely the poultice had drawn enough venom from his wound for him to recover. Nena rocked forward and put her ear to his chest.
His heart beat. Steady and slow. But he did not stir to consciousness.